CHAPTER II.

OUR FIRST SUMMONS.

SOME day in the first week of July (I fancy it was Thursday, the
6th, but I cannot distinguish it with perfect precision, as some of
my memoranda were scattered by my imprisonment) I enjoyed one of
those very rare trips into the country which my engagements
allowed. I was accompanied by two old friends, Mr. J. M. Wheeler
and Mr. John Robertson, the latter being then on a brief first
visit to London. We went up the river by boat, walked for hours
about Kew and Richmond, and sat on the famous Terrace in the early
evening, enjoying the lovely prospect, and discussing a long letter
from Italy, written by one of our best friends, who was spending a
year in that poet's paradise. How we chattered all through that
golden day on all subjects, in the heavens above, on the earth
beneath, and in the waters under the earth! With what fresh
delight, in keeping with the scene, we compared our favorite
authors and capped each other's quotations! Rare Walt Whitman told
Mr. Conway that his forte was "loafing and writing poems."
Well, we loafed too, and if we did not write poems, we startled the
birds, the sheep, the cattle, and stray pedestrians, by reciting
them. I returned home with that pleasant feeling of fatigue which
is a good sign of health -- with tired limbs and a clear brain,
languid but not jaded. Throwing myself into the chair before my
desk, I lit my pipe, and sat calmly puffing, while the incidents of
that happy day floated through my memory as I watched the floating
smoke-wreaths. Casually turning round, I noticed a queer-looking
sheet of paper on the desk. I picked it up and read it. It was a
summons from the Lord Mayor, commanding my attendance at the
Mansion House on the following Tuesday, to answer a charge of
Blasphemy. Strange ending to such a day! What a tragi-comedy life
is -- how full of contrasts and surprises, of laughter and tears.

Two others were summoned to appear with me: Mr. W. J. Ramsey, as
publisher and proprietor, and Mr. E. W. Whittle, as printer. Mr.
Bradlaugh, who was not included in the prosecution until a later
stage of the proceedings, rendered us ungrudging assistance. Mr.
Lickfold, of the well-known legal firm of Lewis and Lewis, was
engaged to watch the case on behalf of Mr. Whittle. As for my own
defence, I resolved from the very first to conduct it myself, a
course for which I had excellent reasons, that were perfectly
justified by subsequent events. In the Freethinker of July
30, 1882, I wrote:

"I have to defend a principle as well as myself. The
most skilful counsel might be half-hearted and over-prudent. Every
lawyer looks to himself as well as to his client. When Erskine made
his great speech at the end of last century in a famous trial for
treason, Thomas Paine said it was a splendid speech for Mr.
Erskine, but a very poor defence of the "Rights of Man." If
Freethought is attacked it must be defended, and the charge of
Blasphemy must be retorted on those who try to suppress liberty in
the name of God. For my part, I would rather be convicted after my
own defence than after another man's; and before I leave the court,
for whatever destination, I will make the ears of bigotry tingle,
and shame the hypocrites who profess and disbelieve."

For whatever destination! Yes, I avow that from the moment I
read the summons I never had a doubt as to my fate. I knew that
prosecutions for Blasphemy had invariably succeeded. How, indeed,
could they possibly fail? I might by skill or luck get one jury to
disagree, but acquittal was hopeless; and the prosecution could go
on trying me until they found a jury sufficiently orthodox to
ensure a verdict of guilty. It was a foregone conclusion. The
prosecution played, "Heads I win, tails you lose."

And now a word as to our prosecutor. Nominally, of course, we
were prosecuted by the Crown; and Judge North had the ignorance or
impudence to tell the Old Bailey jury that this was not only theory
but fact. Lord Coleridge, when he tried us two months later in the
Court of Queen's Bench, told the jury that although the nominal
prosecutor was the Crown, the actual prosecutor, the real plaintiff
who set the Crown in motion, was Sir Henry Tyler. He
provided all the necessary funds. Without his cash, nobody would
have paid for the summons, and the pious lawyers, from Sir Hardinge
Giffard downwards, who harangued the magistrates, the judge and the
jury, would have held their venal tongues, and left poor Religion
to defend herself as she could. And who is Sir Henry Tyler? or,
rather, who was he? for after emerging into public notoriety by
playing the part of a prosecutor, he fell back into his natural
obscurity. He remained a Member of Parliament, but no one heard of
him in that capacity, except now and then when he asked a foolish
question, like others of his kind, who are mysteriously permitted
to sit in our national legislature. Three years ago, however, he
was a more conspicuous personage. He was then chairman of the Board
of Directors of the Brush Light Company; and according to Henry
Labouchere's statements in Truth, he was a "notorious
guinea-pig." He was certainly an adept in the profitable transfer
of shares: so much so, indeed, that at length the shareholders
revolted against their pious chairman, and appointed a committee to
investigate his proceedings. Whereupon this modern Knight of the
Holy Ghost levanted, preferring to resign rather than face the
inquiry. This is the man who asked in the House of Commons whether
Mr. Bradlaugh's daughters could not be deprived of their
hard-earned grants for their pupils who successfully passed the
South Kensington examinations! This is the man who posed as the
amateur champion of omnipotence! Surely if deity wanted a champion,
Sir Henry Tyler is about the last person who would receive an
application. Yet it is men of this stamp who have usually set the
Blasphemy Laws in operation. These infamous laws are allowed to
slumber for years, until some contemptible wretch, to gratify his
private malice or a baser passion, rouses them into vicious
activity, and fastens their fangs on men whose characters are far
superior to his own. With this fact before them, it is strange that
Christians should continue to regard these detestable laws as a
bulwark of their faith, or in any way calculated to defend it
against the inroads of "infidelity."

Sir Henry Tyler may after all have been a tool in the hands of
others, for the St. Stephen's Review has admitted that the
object of this prosecution was to cripple Mr. Bradlaugh in his
parliamentary struggle, and we expected a prosecution long before
it came, in consequence of some conversation on the subject
overheard in the Tea Room of the House of Commons. But this, if
true, while it heightens his insignificance, in no wise lessens his
infamy; and it certainly does not impair, but rather increases, the
force of my strictures on the Blasphemy Laws.

Lord Coleridge, in the Court of Queen's Bench, on the occasion
of Mr. Bradlaugh's trial, sarcastically alluded to Sir Henry Tyler
as "a person entirely unknown to me" -- a very polite way of
saying, "What does such an obscure person mean by assuming the
role of Defender of the Faith?" His lordship must also have
had that individual in his mind when, on the occasion of my own
trial with Mr. Ramsey in the same Court on April 25, 1883, he
delivered himself of these sentiments in the course of his famous
summing-up:

"A difficult form of virtue is quietly and
unostentatiously to obey what you believe to be God's will in your
own lives. It is not very easy to do that, and if you do it, you
don't make much noise in the world. It is very easy to turn upon
somebody who differs from you, and in the guise of zeal for God's
honor, to attack somebody who differs from you in point of opinion,
but whose life may be very much more pleasing to God, whom you
profess to honor, than your own. When it is done by persons whose
own lives are full of pretending to be better than their neighbors,
and who take that particular form of zeal for God which consists in
putting the criminal law in force against somebody else -- that
does not, in many people's minds, create a sympathy with the
prosecutor, but rather with the defendant. There is no doubt that
will be so; and if they should be men -- I don't know anything
about these persons -- but if they should be men who enjoy the wit
of Voltaire, and who do not turn away from the sneer of Gibbon, but
rather relish the irony of Hume -- one's feelings do not go quite
with the prosecutor, but one's feelings are rather apt to
sympathise with the defendants. It is still worse if the person who
takes this course takes it not from a kind of rough notion that God
wants his assistance, and that he can give it -- less on his own
account than by prosecuting other -- or if it is mixed up with
anything of a partisan or political nature. Then it is impossible
that anything can be more foreign from one's notions of what is
high-minded, religious and noble. Indeed, I must say it strikes me
that anyone who would do that, not for the honor of God, but for
his own purposes, is entitled to the most disdainful disapprobation
that the human mind can form."

Some of the orthodox Tory journals censured Lord Coleridge for
these scathing remarks, but his lordship is not easily frightened
by anonymous critics, and it is probable that, if he ever has to
try another case like ours, he may denounce the prosecutors in
still stronger language if their motives are so obviously sinister
as were those of Sir Henry Tyler.

There was a great crowd of people outside the Mansion House on
Tuesday morning, May 11, and we were lustily cheered as we entered.
Long before the Lord Mayor, Sir Whittaker Ellis, took his seat on
the Bench, every inch of standing space in the Justice Room was
occupied. Mr. Bradlaugh took a seat near Mr. Lickfold and
frequently tendered us hints and advice. Mr. Ramsey, Mr. Whittle,
and I took our places in the dock as our names were called out by
Mr. Gresham, the chief clerk of the court. Our summons alleged that
we unlawfully did publish, or caused to be published, certain
blasphemous libels in a newspaper called the Freethinker,
dated the 28th of May, 1882.

Mr. Maloney, who appeared for the prosecution, seemed fully
impressed with the gravity of his position, and when he rose he had
the air of a man who bore the responsibility of defending in his
single person the honor, if not the very existence, of our national
religion. His first proceeding was very characteristic of a
gentleman with such a noble task. He attempted to hand in as
evidence against us several numbers of the Freethinker not
mentioned in the summons, and these would have been at once
admitted by the Lord Mayor, who was apparently used to accepting
evidence in an extremely free and easy fashion, as is generally the
case with the "great unpaid"; but Mr. Lickfold promptly intervened,
and his lordship, seeing the necessity of carefulness, then held
that it would be advisable to adhere to the one case that morning,
and to take out fresh summonses for the other numbers. Mr. Maloney
then proceeded to deal with the numbers before the Court. There
were numerous blasphemies which, if we were committed for trial,
would be set forth in the indictment, but he would "spare the ears
of the Court." One passage, however, he did read, and it is well to
put on record, for the sake of those who talk about our "indecent"
attacks on Christianity, what a prosecuting barrister felt he could
rely on to procure our committal. It was as follows: "As for the
Freethinker, he will scorn to degrade himself by going through the
farce of reconciling his soul to a God whom he justly regards as
the embodiment of crime and ferocity." Those words were not mine;
they were from an article by one of my contributors; but I ask any
reasonable man whether it is not ludicrous to prate about religious
freedom in a country where writers run the risk of imprisonment for
a sentence like that? As Mr. Maloney ended the quotation his voice
sank to a supernatural whisper, he dropped the paper on the desk
before him, and regarded his lordship with a look of pathetic
horror, which the worthy magistrate fully reciprocated. As I
contemplated these two voluntary augurs of our national faith, and
at the same time remembered that far stronger expressions might be
found in the writings of Mill, Clifford, Amberley, Arnold, Newman,
Conway, Swinburne, and other works in Mudie's circulating library,
I could scarcely refrain from laughter.

The witnesses for the prosecution were of the ordinary type --
policemen, detectives, and lawyer's clerks -- with the exception of
Mr. Charles Albert Watts, who by accident or design found himself
in such questionable company. This young gentleman is the son of
Mr. Charles Watts and printer of the Secular Review, and he
was called to prove that I was the editor of the
Freethinker. With the most cheerful alacrity he positively
affirmed that I was, although he had absolutely no more
knowledge on the subject -- as indeed he admitted on
cross-examination -- than any other member of the British public.
His appearance in the witness-box is still half a mystery to me and
I can only ask, Que le diable allait-il faire dans cette
galère?

Ultimately the case was remanded till the following Monday, Mr.
Maloney intimating that he should apply for fresh summonses for
other numbers of the Freethinker, as well as a summons
against Mr. Bradlaugh for complicity in our crime.

Let me here pause to consider how these prosecutions for
blasphemy are initiated. Under the Newspaper Libels Act no
prosecution for libel can be commenced against the editor,
publisher or proprietor of any newspaper, without the written fiat
of the Public Prosecutor. This post is occupied by Sir John Maule,
who enjoys a salary of £2,000 a year, and has the assistance
of a well-appointed office in his strenuous labors. Punch
once pictured him fast asleep before the fire, with a handkerchief
over his face, while all sorts of unprosecuted criminals plied
their nefarious trades; and Mr. Justice Hawkins (I think) has
denounced him as a pretentious farce. He is practically
irresponsible, unlike the Attorney-General, who, being a member of
the Government, is amenable to public opinion. Press laws, except
in cases of personal libel, ought not to be neglected or enforced
at the discretion of such an official. Every interference with
freedom of speech, whenever it is deemed necessary, should be
undertaken by the Government, or at least have its express
sanction. Nothing of the sort happened in our case. On the
contrary, Sir John Maule allowed our prosecution after Sir William
Harcourt had condemned it. The Public Prosecutor set himself above
the Home Secretary. Unfortunately the general press saw nothing
anomalous or dangerous in such a state of things; for an official
like Sir John Maule, while ready enough to sanction the prosecution
of an unpopular journal, which presumably has few friends, is
naturally reluctant, as events have shown, to allow proceedings
against a powerful journal whose friends may be numerous and
influential. Fortunately, however, a Select Committee of the House
of Commons has taken a more sensible view of the Public Prosecutor
and the duties he has so muddled, and recommended the abolition of
his office. Should this step be taken, his duties will probably be
performed by the Solicitor-General, and the press will be freed
from a danger it had not the sense or the courage to avert. As for
Sir John Maule, he will of course retire with a big pension, and
live in fat ease for the rest of his sluggish life.